Lithics 24
NO STONE UNTURNED: A LOOK AT THE STUDY OF STONE TOOLS
IN EARLY PREHISTORY
Adapted from a lecture to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Lithics Studies
Society, given at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 30th June 2004.
D.A. Roe10
__________________________________________________________________________________________
INTRODUCTION
It is a pleasure to begin by congratulating the Society on its 25th anniversary, and it seemed
appropriate to choose a theme that looks back over developments in the study of stone
artefacts. I wondered whether I ought to confine my time-range to the past 25 years, but in the
end I decided on something altogether broader, which I hope will prove suitable for the
occasion.
One surely does not have to convince a Lithic Studies Society audience of the importance of
stone tools as archaeological evidence in early prehistory, but it is worth our remembering
that this importance can be viewed from several different angles. So far as we are concerned
as archaeologists, there is the wonderful capacity of stone to survive over very long periods,
in circumstances where more fragile materials like bone or wood or hide are lost. For the
fragile materials, it is not just a matter of the length of time that has elapsed, but also of all the
dynamic processes associated with changing climates, temperatures and environments during
the Pleistocene or since: stone tools may be altered by those, but they are not destroyed. It
takes something like modern commercial gravel extraction to achieve that. Whether one likes
it or not, and the Lithic Studies Society likes it very much, stone artefacts are likely to remain
the most prolific single category of evidence for all periods of the Palaeolithic.
The stone tools certainly cannot tell us everything, but it is our task to win from them as much
evidence of all kinds as we possibly can. That is a phrase to which I shall return, because one
of the things I want to talk about is how it has changed its meaning over the last century and a
half — indeed, rather longer than that. Exactly why it should have changed its meaning is
fascinating, and is closely related to how archaeology itself has changed. But before we
consider that, spare a thought for the importance of the stone tools not to archaeologists but to
their original makers and users: reflect that another reason for the great abundance of stone
artefacts is their sublime usefulness and effectiveness, and the ease of their manufacture.
Many of the examples cited in this paper are artefacts of flint, quite a lot of them from Britain,
but there are few parts of the world where there is not workable rock of one kind or another
available. All you need is a suitable hammerstone and a block or nodule with an angle from
which a flake can be detached. Detach the flake, and you have provided yourself with one of
the sharpest natural cutting edges in the world (Plate 1), if that is what you want, or
alternatively with a blank that you can easily shape further to produce something more
sophisticated, in which absolute sharpness may not be the sole criterion — an elegant and
regularly curved convex scraper, for example.
How very simple some aspects of life can be, and if it had not been so with the knapping of
flint and other rocks, I am quite sure we ourselves would not be here today to talk about it.
10
University of Oxford.
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And yet, at the same time, it was a staggering piece of perception by the earliest humans,
which seems to have eluded the rest of the animal kingdom in all natural circumstances: that
inside a rather blunt-looking block of stone, infinitely sharp cutting edges were waiting to be
let out, if one knew how to do it. And then, to link these two themes of the archaeologist and
the original tool maker: those who used the hammerstones to detach the flakes and make tools
were providing permanent evidence, because of the way in which stone fractures, to show that
the stones had indeed been shaped artificially and could not be the product of natural
processes.
Plate 1: Nick Toth cutting through elephant hide easily with a sharp flake of English flint. Source:
Nick Toth.
People seem to forget, or perhaps sometimes they choose to ignore, the fact that in situ stone
artefacts are incontestable evidence for the presence of humans, even when there are no
undisputed hominid fossils to be discovered with them (cf. Roe 2000a). On occasion, that may
be immensely important, for example when they are in situ in surprisingly early deposits,
whether it be at Kada Gona in Ethiopia at 2.6 mya, to tell us how far back stone tool
manufacture goes, or at Orce in Spain dated to a minimum of 1.2 mya, giving us a date for the
earliest entry of humans into Europe (Plates 2–3).
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Plate 2: Orce, Spain. Norah Moloney holding some of the newly found Fuente Nueva 3 artefacts a few
moments after I saw them for the first time and realised their significance, in 1993. Photograph by
author.
Plate 3: Orce, Spain. The Barranco León site after excavation in 1995. A hippo mandible is shown
surrounded by in situ artefacts, their positions marked by coloured tags. Photograph by author.
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For every major human migration that there ever was during the Palaeolithic period,
distributions of stone artefacts constitute an absolutely vital segment of the evidence. The
other thing people have often forgotten about early Palaeolithic stone artefacts, and sometimes
fail to remember even today, is that the tools were simply part of the daily working equipment
of their original makers, who created them with absolutely no thought for future lithic
analysts, or even for archaeologists more generally. This was doubtless very remiss of them.
Goodness me, with that sort of mental attitude, how are you ever going to get things like a
behavioural revolution or a proper use of symbolism? But there it is, and maybe it is a root of
most of our classificatory problems.
All this is just background information. I am telling you nothing new — just reminding you of
what should be obvious. But it seems to me that everyone, and especially those coming fresh
to Palaeolithic archaeology, could usefully spend a little time going carefully over such basics
in their minds and considering their implications. Many fruitful trains of thought may start
precisely here.
In looking at the way in which lithic studies have altered over the years, I will take three very
broad periods, for convenience, with rather arbitrary dividing dates. The first period can be up
to 1900, with the second half of the 19th century its most important part; the second I will end
at 1960, and the third is simply the time from 1960 up to the present day. Life is full of
paradoxes, and accordingly you may find two somewhat contradictory linking themes: the
first is the fairly obvious ‗look at how far we have come and at all the clever things we can do
with stone artefacts today‘, and the second is ‗there is really nothing new under the sun‘.
THE EARLY PERIOD, UP TO 1900
We can document awareness of ancient stone implements, notably polished axes and
projectile points, but also the very distinctive bifacial Acheulean handaxes, well back before
the start of the 19th century (Figure 1).
In Britain, the most famous example is probably still that of John Frere at Hoxne, recognising
in 1797 the stone objects which accompanied bones of extinct animals at Hoxne in Suffolk as
‗evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals‘.
The publication of his letter to the Society of Antiquaries (Frere 1800) includes some
excellent illustrations of handaxes. Long before that, there was the discovery of the wellknown Gray‘s Inn Lane handaxe in London, found with fossil elephant bones in about 1690,
and again recognised as an implement, though it was subsequently ascribed to the Romans, to
whose army the elephant was thought likely to belong.
One important point in these two examples, and in others in Britain and elsewhere in Europe,
was the need to demonstrate that the stone objects were indeed humanly made. What else
could they be? Well, thunderbolts, of course. That notion is referred to in two of my favourite
early passages about stone artefacts, and note that they go back well before the time of John
Frere and even of the Gray‘s Inn Lane find: I first encountered them when I was an
undergraduate, as quoted by Glyn Daniel (1950: 25–6). The first is a 16th century one, from
the writings of the Italian Ulisse Aldrovandi, who describes the stones as ‗due to an admixture
of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds,
which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour
with water) and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick‘. It is interesting, however, that as
early as 1570 Michele Mercati, also in Italy, had specifically argued that such objects were
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not thunderbolts, but humanly made. The second quotation, from Jacobus Tollius in Holland
in the mid-17th century, asserts that they were ‗generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation
conglobed in a cloud by the circumposed humour‘.
Figure 1: Early finds of handaxes from Hoxne (left) and Gray’s Inn Lane (right) (from Evans
1860)
Ah well, it‘s not what you say, but the way that you say it. Nothing new under the sun,
indeed: I can readily imagine something like that being said today, straight-faced, at a learned
society lecture, and the audience looking a bit startled at first, but then nodding wisely
because they don‘t like to reveal possible ignorance of the latest literature or terminology, and
students writing it down hurriedly. The thunderbolt idea is quite a widespread one, and it is
worth remembering that there are good examples of handaxes found at Roman sites, in
contexts which make clear that they had actually been picked up and brought in by Romans,
who regarded them with considerable awe as thunderbolts hurled in anger by Jupiter himself.
Two of his personifications were Jupiter Tonans, and Jupiter Lapis — the thunderer and the
stone.
In Britain, the site of Ivy Chimneys at Witham in Essex is the best example, with over 30
handaxes incorporated into structural features of a Romano-British sacred site (Turner &
Wymer 1987). I myself once reported on a perfectly good handaxe for Professor Barry
Cunliffe which came from a Roman site of his at Woolbury in Hampshire, and found myself
arguing that it was indeed a thunderbolt, so far as its finder was concerned (Roe 2000b). The
Romans certainly dug gravel on occasion for building purposes, and I remember wondering
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what would have happened if in doing so they had chanced to strike one of the richer
Acheulean sites, say at Swanscombe, or in the case of Woolbury, perhaps one of the prolific
Test Valley occurrences, with numerous handaxes. Would they have concluded that Jupiter
had been quite extraordinarily put out with the local population, or might they have worked
out what was actually going on, and started off Palaeolithic archaeology nearly two thousand
years ahead of time, perhaps subsequently founding our Society rather earlier than was
actually the case?
The other main task for those studying early stone artefacts in this first period was to account
for their presence in contexts that were clearly very ancient, because this was wholly out of
line with the Biblical account of the creation and subsequent events up to Noah and the flood,
which one challenged at one‘s peril. The Book of Genesis is from many points of view an
excellent read, but it has arguable shortcomings as a text-book for earlier prehistory, and for
our 18th and 19th century predecessors there were no PPS and Lithics to fall back on, let alone
the new volume Lithics in Action11, whose publication we are celebrating today. It was safer
and altogether more comfortable to attribute the Gray‘s Inn Lane elephant to the Romans. But
the tide was turning, as the 19th century unfolded. Geologists, such as William Smith, Charles
Lyell and James Hutton, had shown that the gravels and other characteristic Pleistocene
deposits in which the worked stones occurred had been formed, not by a seven-day creation
and a Universal Deluge, but by the very same processes of sedimentation and erosion under
varying climatic conditions that could still be seen at work and studied: these processes were
extremely slow, and the past must accordingly be a very long period indeed, though
unfortunately there were no methods for determining actual chronometric dates beyond the
reach of the earliest calendric systems. At the same time, quite independently, workers in
many different areas of the biological sciences were getting to grips with the notions of
evolution and adaptation, processes on which the Book of Genesis was silent, and it was
becoming possible to ask why the origins and diversity of humans should be in any way
different in nature from those of plants and animals. This was the time of Charles Darwin,
Alfred Wallace and Thomas Huxley.
The work of the archaeologists who authenticated the discoveries of stone artefacts in
association with extinct faunal remains, whether it was at Hoxne in Suffolk, or in the Somme
Valley in France, or at Kent‘s Cavern in Devon, was again an independent contribution, but
note that it needed to be made in conjunction with the work of the geologists and the
palaeontologists.
Thus John Evans, whose main interest was archaeology, worked closely from the end of the
1850s with scholars like Joseph Prestwich, Charles Lyell, Hugh Falconer and William BoydDawkins: one might feel that this was merely the beginning of the situation today, when the
work of Palaeolithic archaeologists is just one aspect of the broader discipline of Quaternary
Research.
In this early period, then, those concerned with stone artefacts had to demonstrate first their
artificial nature, and second their high antiquity. After that, it became largely a matter of
classification, which was used to establish the basic framework and indeed the basic
terminology of the Stone Age — Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic — and then of
divisions within each of them. Both typology and technology were taken into account. I will
keep to the Palaeolithic here, and simply note that by my chosen year of 1900, much of the
familiar terminology of the European Palaeolithic which we still use was already in place,
11
The Lithics in Action volume is reviewed on page 82.
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thanks to the work of scholars like Gabriel de Mortillet in France, and indeed, because many
of the discoveries were made in France, we had terms like Acheulean, Levalloisian,
Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian, each with its characteristic implement
types and basic knapping techniques, such as bifacially flaked handaxes in the Acheulean,
specialised cores and flake tools in Levalloisian and Mousterian, and different styles of blade
tools in the divisions of the Upper Palaeolithic. If one could occasionally add in other things
like decorated bone-work, that was all to the good, but the main reliance was certainly on the
stone tools. However, the point I really want to make is that some of the early workers went
much further than classification, and were actually well aware of, and actively interested in,
some of the aspects of lithic studies that attract us most today, notably conjoining and
refitting, the study of use-wear traces and experimental tool manufacture. I fear they do not
often get credit for it. There are various reasons for that, and in my view one of them is the
present culture of unwillingness by both students and teachers to make use of literature that is
more than five or ten years old.
Britain can offer us many examples of such work, and I will choose John Evans, later Sir John
Evans, first. It was he, with the geologist Joseph Prestwich, who played the leading part in
vindicating John Frere‘s old finds from Hoxne and those of Boucher de Perthes in the Somme
Valley. The following quotation is taken from a paper which Evans wrote as early as 1860. In
a section mainly concerned with showing that handaxes are humanly made objects, he shows
a good understanding of the artefacts, with no previous work to guide him, and also reveals
his readiness to experiment:
‘The manner in which they have been fashioned appears to have been by blows from a rounded pebble
mounted as a hammer, administered directly upon the edge of the implements, so as to strike off flakes
on either side. At all events I have by this means reproduced some of the forms in flint, and the edges
of the implements thus made present precisely the same character of fracture as those from the drift’
(Evans 1860: 293).
Even more remarkable is this passage from the first edition of Evans‘ book The Ancient Stone
Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain (1872). It really might come from
some present-day work on use-wear, except that the language is more elegant. He writes:
‘But to return to the flakes of flint which were used in this country for scraping or cutting purposes at
an early period, when metal was either unknown or comparatively scarce. Each flake, when
dexterously made, has on either side a cutting edge, so sharp that it almost might, like the obsidian
flakes of Mexico, be used to shave with. As long as this edge is used merely for cutting soft substances,
it may remain for some time comparatively uninjured, and even if slightly jagged its cutting power is
not impaired. If long in use, the sides of the blade become rather polished by wear, and I have
specimens, both English and foreign, on which the polish, thus produced, can be observed. If the flake
has been used for scraping a surface, say, for instance, of bone or wood, the edge will be found to
wear away, by extremely minute portions chipping off nearly at right angles to the scraping edge, and
with the lines of fracture running back from it. The coarseness of these minute chips will vary in
accordance with the amount of pressure used and the material scraped…In all cases where any
considerable number of flakes of flint occur, such as there appears to be good reason for attributing to
a remote period, a greater or less proportion of them will, on examination, be found to bear these
signs of wear upon them, extending over some portion of their edges’ (Evans 1872: 260–261).
As for early examples of conjoining and refitting artefacts, I always choose as my favourite
example the work of Worthington G. Smith of Dunstable, Bedfordshire, author of the
splendid book Man the Primeval Savage (1894). By the early 1880s, he had examined in
admirable detail several primary context Acheulean sites around both Stoke Newington in
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northeast London and Caddington in Bedfordshire: he did not use that particular phrase to
describe them, but he was well aware of what they were, and especially at Caddington he
recorded and illustrated many examples of refits and conjoins. He later added similar sites at
Gaddesden Row in Hertfordshire and Round Green in Bedfordshire to the list (Smith 1916).
His work and recording of his observations were of exemplary quality, especially when one
recalls that he was operating virtually single-handed, and his only financial and technical
resources were those he could provide for himself.
In the first picture reproduced here, Worthington Smith has replaced a tranchet flake on a
handaxe at a manufacturing site at Caddington, and the text makes clear the care he took and
that he fully understood the flake‘s significance (Figure 2). In the second picture, he has
recovered and conjoined a large number of soft-hammer handaxe finishing flakes, in two
groups which can also be fitted together, and has used plaster of Paris to make a cast of the
implement itself, which was not found at the site (Figure 3).
Figure 2: Conjoins from Caddington by Worthington Smith (1894: Fig. 96)
A contemporary and friend of Smith‘s in north Kent, Flaxman C.J. Spurrell, had the good
fortune to discover prolific undisturbed Lower and Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Northfleet
and Crayford areas, some of them still of major significance today, and he too was able in the
1880s to reconstruct the knapping processes in considerable detail, again conjoining many
pieces (Spurrell 1880, 1883, 1884). These pioneers do not deserve to be forgotten, and if the
Lithic Studies Society does not remember and celebrate them, who will?
There is so much more one could say about the early days of lithic studies, but I must leave
my account there, with just these few examples to give you the flavour of the period as it
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unfolded in Britain. Perhaps I have been able to show how very varied the different levels of
enquiry were.
Figure 3: Conjoins from Caddington by Worthington Smith (1894: Figs. 113 & 114)
1900–1960
If they had to pick a single word to characterise lithic studies in this second of my three
periods, from 1900–1960, many people would probably choose ‗typology‘. There was, of
course, a very great deal more to these 60 years than that, but amongst the major figures who
dominate the period are people like the l‘Abbé Henri Breuil in France, and Miles Burkitt, J.
Reid Moir and Reginald Smith in England, and typology was certainly their stock in trade.
While their typological classifications were usually based on personal opinion and experience,
by 1960 some of the great typological schemes which were based more formally on
measurements and indices, notably that of François Bordes (1961), had been devised and
published.
It seems to me that at the root of the great elaboration of typology was a change in the aims of
Palaeolithic archaeologists, now that their discipline was firmly established. There was no
longer any serious general challenge to the view of stone tools as artificial objects and it was
accepted that the human race was extremely ancient, so the new task was to try and establish
the order of events in early human history, and to understand the pattern of the past, as
represented by the abundant archaeological evidence. As we have seen, stone tools were by
far the largest category of that.
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It is true, of course, that controversy could still arise about the validity of claims that
particular objects were genuine artefacts: in Britain, for example, the start of this period sees
the bitter clashes about eoliths, particularly those found in Kent by Benjamin Harrison, and all
the arguments about the East Anglian ‗Crag‘ and ‗Pre-Crag‘ industries claimed so insistently
by Reid Moir (e.g. 1927), but perhaps there was a degree of inevitability about those episodes,
which were a part of the process of defining the time-range of the Palaeolithic period, and in
any case the arguments were over typological issues as well as stratigraphic and chronological
ones.
It is so easy today to pour scorn on the efforts of our predecessors who worked in the first half
of the 20th century, and if you are writing a student essay or a thesis, or a book, or if you are
preparing a grant application, it is standard practice to expend at least a paragraph or two
saying how wrong they got it, before going on to indicate how clever you are yourself and
how you are about to put all their errors right, given the money. They are often derided as
mere typologists and culture historians, but I am not sure that this is actually very fair.
Note first that there is absolutely nothing wrong with typology itself: it is simply a process of
basic identification and classification of objects, whether they be stone tools or anything else.
It remains in use today, and always will, being absolutely essential as a first stage in most
enquiries concerning archaeological material. Typology gives the first answer to the question
‗what have we got here?‘ The problems arise with the uses to which the typological
conclusions are subsequently put and, yes, some workers certainly got rather carried away. If
they happened to have rather assertive natures and a high regard for their own judgement,
which some of them certainly did, they would, of course, defend their opinions unyieldingly
against all comers. However, setting that aside, I would suggest to you that the Palaeolithic
archaeologists of this period were operating under grave disadvantages, even if they were
unaware of them. Look down on them if you wish as beyond-hope culture historians, but you
might also ask yourself what else it was possible for them to be, under the circumstances.
Would you have done any better, in their place?
Consider first the climate of thought around 1900, when the period begins. As we have seen, a
basic set of stages had been generally agreed for the Old Stone Age, and the whole trend of
this was from simplicity in the Lower Palaeolithic to relative sophistication in the Upper
Palaeolithic. Was upward progress not the way of the world? It always would be: had not the
recently completed 19th century been a period of dramatic technological advance on all fronts,
and indeed, as the start of the new modern era, how could it have been anything else?
Accordingly, if you wanted to mark passing time in terms of artefacts, for any period, historic
or prehistoric, you simply needed to arrange them in ascending order of complexity and
technical elegance, and the result was a sequence, which you could rely on and then use to
interpret wider issues. As a passing thought, some of that is perhaps not so very different in
principle from what was later called seriation, and remember how excited everyone got about
that, twenty or so years ago, partly because you could do it with computers. As for the
Palaeolithic in the early 20th century, colleagues in the biological sciences had just
successfully shown us that animals, plants, even humans, all ‗evolved‘: why should it be any
different with stone tools? In the excitement, no-one pointed out that the biological processes
by which living creatures or organisms are produced and change, and the principles of
genetics, are really rather different from the rules and practical dynamics of flint-knapping.
Now all this would surely have been different if there had been reliable methods of
establishing the ages of sites or objects, because that would have shown that the actual
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sequence of types in stone tools and other artefacts was by no means a simple linear one. As
things were, stratigraphic sequences were about all there was to provide an independent
check, but they were almost always open to differing interpretations, and in Britain far too
many of the artefacts in the succession of gravels were derived, in any case. That is another
vital point: a further major disadvantage for our predecessors was that understanding of the
Pleistocene succession was still very poor, and there was no sense of its length or complexity.
Up to 1900, although the existence of glacial conditions in the past was widely accepted,
many believed that there had been only one cold period, and the arguments usually concerned
whether Palaeolithic artefacts were ‗preglacial‘ or ‗postglacial‘. The extensive research of
Penck and Brückner (1901–9) in the Alps in the first decade of the 20th century then gave us
the four glaciations of Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm, but right up to and well beyond 1960
there were simply far too few cold or warm stages available into which to fit the stratified
archaeological sites, so that correlations of assumed sequences could still give results in
drastically the wrong order.
Figure 4 shows a hand-drawn sequence for the Somme Valley Terraces by l‘Abbé Breuil, just
asking to be argued over by his colleagues. You may just be able to make out how he has
boldly fitted in his own seven or eight numbered stages of the Acheulean into successive
deposits, but maybe it‘s better if you can‘t.
Figure 4: Hand-drawn section of the Somme terrace sequence by l’Abbé Henri Breuil, reproduced
from the original by Coles & Higgs (1969: 209)
The palaeomagnetic polarity sequence and the marine Oxygen Isotope Stages were
undreamed of by archaeologists pretty well throughout this second period, and even when
they were discovered and after the results began to be readily accessible (e.g. Shackleton &
Opdyke 1973), the news seemed to spread very slowly. I can remember as late as 1976
mentioning in a paper at the Nice UISPP Congress, at a colloquium where many leading
Palaeolithic archaeologists were present, that the deep sea cores showed 19 separate
numbered climatic stages since the start of the Middle Pleistocene, and seeing looks of blank
incomprehension and disbelief from many parts of the room. Right through these 60 years, it
was as often a case of geologists seeking typological pronouncements from archaeologists to
‗date‘ gravel deposits, as it was the reverse.
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But if typology was still dominant as late as 1960, at least we can say that there was already a
sense of unease about its role, and signs that the classic sequence might contain some hidden
complexities.
In Britain, there had for example been growing awareness of the Clactonian since early in the
20th century, as something broadly contemporary with the Acheulean but different, and
therefore a bit alarming: still, even that had given rise to a Clactonian typological sequence of
I, IIa, IIb and III, the latter being best seen at High Lodge, a site whose subsequent
reinterpretation nicely illustrates the point that limited knowledge of the Pleistocene sequence
was a brake on understanding.
Figure 5 shows Clactonian flakes and cores from the type site, making it typologically
‗different‘ from the Acheulean, and Figure 6 shows some of the fine flake tools from High
Lodge, made on plain-platform flakes, which to a typologist must necessarily be a later
development, hence ‗Clacton III‘, though we now know they are substantially earlier in age.
Figure 5: Drawings of Clactonian artefacts from Clacton (Coles& Higgs 1969: Fig. 76, after M.D.
Leakey)
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Figure 6: Drawings of Clactonian artefacts from High Lodge (from Ashton et al. 1988: Plate 14)
I myself would also regard as particularly significant the fact that during the first half of the
20th century active interest began to expand in the Palaeolithic of areas outside Europe,
notably Africa, India, the Near East and the Far East. The discovery of sites like Olduvai
Gorge12 (Plate 4), the vastly expanded record of hominid fossils, often in association with
artefacts of one kind or another, the work of Hallam Movius on the ‗chopper-chopping tool
complex‘ of eastern Asia and the idea of the Movius Line: all these things put the European
Palaeolithic sequence very properly into a world context, and began to demand an altogether
broader ‗pattern of the past‘, which typology alone could not supply.
For those who had eyes to see, there were also certain other individual discoveries of stone
artefacts which were creating awkward and intriguing problems for typology — an example
was the discovery in both Palestine and Syria by Dorothy Garrod and Alfred Rust of blade
tools in undisturbed levels dominated by, for goodness‘ sake, Lower Palaeolithic artefact
types, at Tabun Cave and at Jabrud. Because of the intervention of the Second World War,
12
Olduvai Gorge, with almost two million years of sedimentation, full of archaeological material, is the sort of
site Europe could not parallel.
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those particular finds, made in the late 1930s, did not become generally known or discussed
till the 1950s (see for example Rust 1950; Garrod 1956).
Yes, not all was well with typology and culture history, and in retrospect one might say that
by 1960 lithic analysis was facing a crisis. I‘m not sure many were aware of it at the time — I
don‘t suppose l‘Abbé Breuil, for example, lost much sleep over it. But what could actually be
done about it? Break-throughs were clearly needed in both methodology and interpretation,
and the decades that followed would bring them.
Plate 4: General view of Olduvai Gorge. Photograph by author.
SINCE 1960
My third and last period is the time since 1960. I chose 1960 as my dividing line somewhat
arbitrarily, and I suppose I could just as well have chosen 1961, which was in fact the year in
which I ceased to be an undergraduate and began doctoral research. Either way, this third
period happens to coincide with my own professional career, and so I suppose I‘m just taking
a somewhat personal analytical and retrospective look at all the things that have happened
around me and trying to make sense of them: which were the influential things, and which
were paths leading to dead ends. It sounds like a typical academic approach, doesn‘t it?
Perhaps I should have spent more time out there in the real world, making new discoveries
and letting others bother about what it all means or doesn‘t mean.
In fact, aspects of the real world which have little to do with archaeology can be surprisingly
influential, when one stops to think about it. Yes, beware of the real world. I mentioned
doctoral research a few moments ago, and in these recent decades a huge amount of
information has been uncovered and processed by research students in search of doctorates, to
the benefit of all, but just look how that process has changed during this particular period.
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When I began research on the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in 1961, I was the first
British research student in that field for at least a decade, and one of very few who had chosen
a Palaeolithic topic of any kind since the end of the Second World War. There was no time
limit for completing a thesis and University fees and the costs of research travel were
minimal. Computers, so far as archaeologists were concerned, did not exist, or had hardly
been heard of: they were machines that filled whole buildings, and had spinning discs and
flashing lights, and punched paper tape. I include a picture which I call ‗still life with
handaxes‘, showing callipers, slide-rule, hand-drawn diagrams and computer input as punched
paper tape (Plate 5). Today‘s students cannot believe such things existed as state-of-the-art
equipment.
Plate 5: Metrical equipment, 1969 (Roe 1970: Fig. 142). Photograph: V.P. Narracott.
For all those reasons, I reckon I travelled fifty thousand miles looking at British stone
artefacts, and I ended up needing to produce 38,000 items of basic metrical data,
measurements and ratios, one at a time, by hand, before I could even begin the task of
analysis and get results. The thesis appendix containing my list of sites and material from
them, which I assembled during the same travelling as a separate part of the work, ran to well
over 300 pages when later published as the CBA‘s British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic
Gazetteer (Roe 1968).
Today, no research student would be allowed to start such a project: it would cost too much
and take too long. At least I got to handle and know my material quite well, and my
contemporaries working on later periods of prehistory could say the same of their own chosen
data. The atmosphere of research was generally co-operative and non-competitive, at least
partly because of the low cost of working and living and the corresponding lesser importance
of grants.
All that changed quite rapidly in the 1970s. At first there was a boom period for archaeology,
with a huge expansion in the number of university departments, good funding, and intense
popular interest in the dramatic field discoveries that were being made all over the world.
Plate 6 shows some of my earlier research students, who all produced long theses at Oxford
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without much pressure on time or length: Larry Keeley, Garth Sampson, Bill Waldren, Simon
Collcutt and Shelley Cranshaw.
Plate 6: Derek Roe with some Oxford research students in 1978 following the award of Larry Keeley’s
D.Phil degree (from the left: Shelley Cranshaw, Bill Waldren, Larry Keeley, Garth Sampson and
Simon Collcutt, together with Mrs Keeley and Mrs Collcutt). Photograph: author’s collection.
But more students meant more competition for jobs, and the perception of a need to elbow
one‘s way to the front. Some people had pretty sharp elbows. Then add the massive economic
crisis which the whole world faced, with little warning, in the early and middle 1970s, when
the cost of oil soared dramatically and the result was inflation on a scale never before seen, so
that suddenly there was little money to spare for things like archaeology: expansion changed
to contraction and job opportunities began to melt away. No time now to agree with a
colleague‘s conclusions and admire his or her work: in the atmosphere of fierce competition,
each completed thesis became a target to attack and preferably destroy, with the side effect
that conclusions and suggested new research methods never got a fair hearing, because to get
your doctorate you must be original, not follow someone else. I was safely past that stage —
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just as well, I think, as I should not have been good at the hostility stuff — and I remember
later referring to all this (in a chapter I contributed to a book) as ‗the PhD effect‘ (Roe 1992:
119). The spiralling costs of pretty well everything were translated into a need for haste, so
that to go and look carefully at material in distant museums or private collections virtually
ceased to be an option.
To cement the change in approach, number-crunching computers were now rampant and
accessible. This meant that those who chose to study stone artefacts certainly needed
numerical data, but life was often just too short for them to get it by studying all possible
relevant material for themselves. An existing data-base was ideal: if they studied artefacts
directly at all, it had to be just those which were quickly and economically available, or small
samples from large collections. Meanwhile, attack, attack, anything and everyone: Darwin got
it right, and this was the local version of survival of the fittest — but there were plenty of
places in America and England where he would still have been given a rough ride, just on
principle, if he had turned up during this particular era as a visiting speaker at a departmental
seminar. Being right was actually rather unhelpful, and had to be stopped: it tended to kill off
a subject.
In spite of all this, some excellent work was still done, of course, but in general all the factors
I have mentioned were operating to downgrade the scale and quality of research theses, even
if more and more were produced. Just to complete this line of thought: look at the very
distressing situation (as it seems to me) today. Our ever-caring government has put the
universities in a position where they must agree to and even politely applaud the rule that a
doctoral thesis must be submitted in three or at most four years, to show that the public money
that funds the grants is being put to the best possible use, the measure being speed of
completion, not quality of the product or even the outcome of the examination. That sort of
timetable may indeed work well in some disciplines, but for archaeologists, it rules out at a
stroke a research operation of proper scale on many topics. Classic microwear analysis of
stone artefacts will serve as an example, since it may take a student at least two years just to
learn the trade and do the experimental work, and thereafter every piece still needs much time
to examine fully. So, only a very few pieces can be studied. Nor is there now either time, or
enough money, to do research based on new excavations at a number of sites, as used to be
possible. Effectively, the PhD degree risks being reduced to a training exercise at a relatively
low level, and I think we are all the losers for that.
But that is quite enough about the down side of my third and final period. Let us instead
applaud the fact that it has also produced a huge amount of progress that is pure good news
for lithic studies: these decades have seen profound technical advances and also a
fundamental change of aims and interests.
We left things in 1960 at something of an impasse: typology held sway, but there were
beginning to be signs of concern that the picture it revealed was not wholly accurate or wholly
sufficient. I said that breakthroughs were needed, and soon there were several. I still think that
the most influential were the advent of proper chronological methods that covered the early
Palaeolithic, plus the realisation of the complexity of the Pleistocene sequence, because these
in combination showed that typological evolution was not the controlling factor: it was
inescapably true that there were stone tool industries which were contemporary or
overlapping in time, but quite different in appearance, both typologically and technologically.
Once that was clear, it became not merely possible but absolutely necessary to look at stone
tools in quite different ways, to seek an explanation. To some extent, the whole history of
lithic studies since then has been the story of attempts to discover the reasons for perceived
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and quantified variability, with the preferred explanations increasingly couched in practical
behavioural terms.
The arrival on the scene in the late 1960s of Lewis Binford was enormously influential in
getting this process started, and the Mousterian of southwest France was one of the first great
battlegrounds, with François Bordes clinging to the old style of interpretation and Binford
introducing dynamic notions like functional variability linked to settlement and subsistence
strategy, along with a whole load of new language, some of which was a bit counterproductive at first in certain parts of Europe. More scholars joined the fray from various
directions, some immediately, others later (for an overview, see for example Binford 1983:
65–209). At the same time, ideas derived from the work of geographers were also making an
important impact on archaeological thinking: ‗site catchment analysis‘ was one of them (VitaFinzi & Higgs 1970). Everything was at last directing the Palaeolithic archaeologist to ask far
more relevant basic questions of a newly discovered site, questions about humans in a
landscape: why were the people here, particularly, and what were they doing? What were the
resources that attracted them, and what were the constraints they faced? How did they get
food and water? Where had they come from and where did they go? How does this site link
with others in the immediate region and further afield? Then remember what was said earlier:
that the largest single category of evidence at a Palaeolithic site is likely to be stone artefacts,
and recall the phrase I used at the beginning: it is our task to win from them as much evidence
of all kinds as we possibly can.
Boxgrove, in Sussex, is a site that will be closely familiar to many readers, and it is a site
where just such questions have been asked, and the very numerous stone artefacts have been
of vital importance in providing answers. The research at Boxgrove offers us a fine example
of the general way in which the whole nature of lithic studies has changed in the post-1960
period. The changes have, of course, been closely linked to that great quiet revolution of the
last half century, the emergence and rapid growth of science-based archaeology. It was not
just that the way had been opened for new approaches to stone artefacts, but also the fact that
the laboratory techniques which would yield answers became actually possible. Look at
microwear analysis, to which I keep returning. Microwear work had been going on in Russia
since around 1940, but few publications in accessible language had found their way to the
West. M.W. Thompson‘s English translation of S.A. Semenov‘s Prehistoric Technology
(Semenov 1964) came as a revelation and sparked much interest, but since then we have had
the move from low-power to high-power microscopy, the advent of scanning electron
microscopes, and the discovery that in ideal conditions actual use-residues can be bonded to
the surface of even very ancient stone tools, including animal and plant material potentially
identifiable to species level; there is perhaps also the possibility of extracting datable material
and even DNA, relating to that particular episode of human tool use. Look too at the progress
in the science of refitting and conjoining, and the emergence of the whole idea of the chaîne
opératoire in the interpretation of how humans were making, using and discarding stone
tools: in this, the débitage, previously often ignored in purely typological studies, can be just
as important as the finished products.
All of that has got even better with the development of laboratory techniques for sourcing raw
materials, which have sometimes shown surprising distances, 80 or 100 miles, sometimes
more, between a site and the sources of some of the stone for tools made or used there. If you
really want to know about humans in a landscape and about contact networks, this kind of
evidence can be extremely helpful. Another aspect of the study of raw materials is to examine
how the nature of a particular rock, or the shape and size of the units in which it occurs, may
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be a powerful factor contributing to the observed typological or morphological differences, or
indeed similarities, between sets of artefacts. And if you follow that route, one of the paths
may be experimental lithic technology, which has reached extraordinary levels of expertise as
time has passed, both in the replication of original tool types and manufacturing techniques,
and in experimental tool use.
It is time to end, and these few examples must serve. I have said nothing specific about the
ways in which computer technology has made life easier for the lithic analyst in obtaining and
presenting results, and I have not mentioned at all the great growth of archaeological theory
during these same decades, though some of its roots certainly lie in the changing aims and
approaches, and in the ambient circumstances of the post-1960 period. I do not think either is
a suitable topic for this occasion — nor would I be the right person to talk about them: I only
mention them now to prove that, ancient as I am, I have at least heard of these modern things.
This is a very exciting time to be involved with the study of earlier prehistoric stone artefacts:
huge advances have been made, and one has the feeling that the right questions are now being
asked, which may not always have been the case in the past. Whether future generations will
take the same view in assessing us, remains to be seen. But I hope I have made the point that
some of our predecessors in the 19th century already had the same interests as we have today,
and that is what I meant when I said at the start that ‗there is nothing new under the sun‘. It is
just that much more has become actually possible, and who can tell where technological
progress will take us next? Maybe the Acheuleans said those same words to each other, in
whatever language they did or did not have.
Meanwhile, we certainly don‘t know everything yet, and perhaps I should let John Evans,
writing over 130 years ago in 1872, have the final word in his sonorously elegant way. You
can apply his remarks to whatever your own favourite lithics problem is:
‘The investigators into the early history of mankind are like explorers in search of the source of one of
those mighty rivers which traverse whole continents: we have departed from the homes of modern
civilization in ascending the stream, and arrived at a spot where traces of human existence are but
few, and animal life has assumed strange and unknown forms… and though we may plainly perceive
that we are nearer the source of which we are in search, yet we know not at what distance it may still
be from us; nor, indeed, can we be certain in what direction it lies, nor even whether it will be
ultimately discovered’ (Evans 1872: 4254–26).
The date of 1872 is too early, but otherwise I myself would suppose he was thinking of how
we should explain the Clactonian.
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